It was around this time last year that the first contact between the Clippers and Celtics was made, with a radical idea: Sending venerable big man Kevin Garnett to the West Coast to play for L.A.

Shortly after that, the Nets approached the Celtics about making a deal for small forward Paul Pierce, a lifelong Celtics star who seemed destined to finish out his career in Boston. This was sacrilege among Celtics fans, of course, but team president Danny Ainge had long been itching to remake his over-aged roster.

Now, with Garnett and Pierce slated to come back to Boston as members of the Nets on Sunday for the first time this year, it’s a good time to look back on what might have been. Had things worked out just the right way, the Celtics might have accelerated their rebuilding process by trading Pierce and Garnett at this time last season.

Start with Garnett and the Clippers. At the time, sources told Sporting News, Clippers coach Vinny Del Negro knew he was fighting to keep his job, and knew that his sour relationship with young big man DeAndre Jordan—whose free-throw struggles rendered him useless at the end of games—would be something that would hold his team back.

Del Negro had nearly been fired the previous offseason, and felt that he had to get his team deep into the West playoffs — likely the conference finals — in order to have any chance at a contract extension. He knew he had a better chance to get there with a polished veteran like Garnett on board than with the mistake-prone Jordan in the middle.

The Clippers-Celtics discussions would continue for weeks, right up to the NBA’s trade deadline, but ultimately, there were too many obstacles to getting the deal done. Garnett, who owns a home in Malibu, would have been required to waive his no-trade clause. The Celtics insisted on getting both Jordan and dynamic guard Eric Bledsoe in return for Garnett, which was a very steep price for a declining 36-year-old.

Also, as sources told Sporting News, the Clippers’ splintered front office — with Del Negro on one side, and front office executives Gary Sacks and Andy Roeser on the other — was never on the same page with the deal, anyway.

As for Pierce, the Nets had offered Humphries and Brooks, with a first-round draft pick. That might have been a good starting point for Boston — but only if Garnett was certain to be traded, too. The idea was that, if the Celtics were to have Garnett on board, they needed to keep Pierce and give the pair one last shot at a postseason run. But deal Garnett, and you might as well deal Pierce, too.

Either way, the Nets’ offer was too thin, and Boston would have needed something more — either a ’16 draft pick or a young player like Mirza Teletovic or European star shooting guard Bojan Bogdanovic, whose rights belong to Brooklyn. The Celtics didn’t push the proposals, though, because the Garnett-to-the-Clippers possibility had fallen through.

But what if the Celtics had lowered their Garnett demands? Del Negro might have been able to persuade others in the Clippers organization to accept a trade for Garnett if the asking price was Bledsoe or Jordan, rather than both, plus, say, a 2015 draft pick (the one the Celtics eventually got for allowing Doc Rivers out of his contract). Bledsoe, languishing behind Chris Paul, was more readily available.

That would have prompted the Celtics to be more active in dealing Pierce, and they probably could have gotten the Nets to agree to a deal involving Humphries, Brooks, a 2014 pick and either Teletovic or Bogdanovic.

Hypothetically, then, the Celtics’ haul might have looked like this: Bledsoe, Humphries, Brooks, Bogdanovic and first-rounders in ’14 and ’15.

Compare that to what the Celtics did get for Pierce and Garnett: Humphries, Brooks, Wallace, Joseph and first-rounders in ’14, ’16 and ’18. That means one more draft pick, but no budding youngsters like Bledsoe (or Jordan) and Bogdanovic (or Teletovic). Plus, there is the weighty contract of Wallace, who has been increasingly cantankerous in the locker room.

It’s speculation, of course, and there were plenty of hurdles in the way before Ainge and the Celtics could have pulled off such a series of moves — you can’t blame Ainge for the what-ifs that didn’t materialize. But had Boston somehow been able to thread that needle, had the Garnett-to-the-Clippers and Pierce-to-the Nets deals somehow worked out, the Celtics’ rebuilding program would be much farther along already.